Topic: Is it worth hosting a lightning node? - page 3. (Read 887 times)

wind fury continues to advertise LN.. yet also advertises his lack of first hand experience using it. or knowing its flaws or the bugs or its methods to manipulate things

if people put coins in. those other channels and routes around that person can actually manipulate the user to get him to lose his value. not have funds on their side to use themselves. or just be froze out of being a route

maybe it would have been best to spend your time actually learning about LN instead of just repeating the old promotional material handed to you by others. its getting too obvious now

...

anyway
without any bugs, flaws, its easy to abuse a LN user
find one with say X units of measure
ask the crowd of HYIP/pyramid scammers to join that user and send you X coins
then ask them to recruit their own dummies to join and send coins to them

you<0:X>userscammerA
becomes
youuserscammerA

you leave with X extra and let the pyramid scammers play

scammerBuserscammerA
scammerC/
becomes
scammerB<0:XX>user<:XX>scammerA
scammerC<0:XX>/
scammerA leaves with XX

'users' has to continually add more funds to open more channels
while people are exiting with more funds then they started with

..
and thats just one way to:
profit from LN
freeze out 'user' from doing any transactions for himself..
freeze out 'user' from being a route for other ethical users..
make him give up because he cant just keep funding new channels

yes in the end one scammer wont get returns. but the initial scammers did. and while it was lasting the user was losing funds and getting frustrated that he was getting abused by others.

again. no bugs. no flaws. no hacks.. just using LN features as intended

(there are many other ways to abuse LN and gain funds. but i just shown the weakest one that anyone with common sense could have figured out themselves. so no harm mentioning this one)

It's simply for convinience and efficiency, like mining. It is still the choice of the user, IF they want to "play the game".

If HODLers want to entrust their coins to a trusted third party to "stake" their Bitcoin for them, or run their own Lightning node, you can't make, or not make them.

Well you can run it on your PC assuming you can make it run consistently without downtime. It's not that choosy in terms of hardware though,  besides ample amounts of memory and bandwidth. You can use a Raspberry Pi 3.


I don't think so. You're probably going to be lucky to even breakeven with the electricity, bandwidth, and hardware costs lol.

the commercial bank game for LN is to dis-incentivise people from making their own profit
the commercial bank game is for people to deposit/lock their funds into their custody
the commercial bank game is to make it appear faster and cheaper and more reliable to use the banks services

certain devs are attached to companies that have over $100m in investment from the big banking corps and those investors want their returns.(banks dont just give out charity. they always want returns)

if you think that you can be independent and make profit on LN you are in for a shock
there is already alot of chatter that the big guys will attach themselves to you via channels. and then attach themselves to others so that a 10 hop route via independants is more expensive than their 2 hop route through the big guys 'factory channels' because they are the shortcut bypass, while making the normally 5 hop route appear to be 10 hops by being inbetween each

in the end making the independants give in and just put their funds into the big guys custody in full and then be offered temporary non broadcast 'factory' channels that can be consolidated/reconciled and aggregated without having to open and close onchain.
basically keep handing out paper promissory notes(bank notes) so people dont want/need/have/care to hold gold anymore

If you have 497 btc, you can earn about 0.054 btc (~$490) per day on celsius lending your coin, and I would assume somewhat similar amounts on other lending sites.

It does not look like there is currently enough volume to make a lot running a LN node. The benefit to doing so now is to learn how to run a LN node, and work out the kinks if you want to run a node when volume is higher in the future.

No one on a PoS network is going bankrupt because of it.
You can't say the same for Bitcoin.
Ignoring PoW major failures is why you stay an idiot.

Bitcoin is not stakable , Confused_Fury.

Has kissing G.Maxwell ass or lying about bitcoin every day since you joined made you rich, Nope.  
P.S. You need chap stick.

Has Confused_Fury made a profit running a LN Hub , Nope. 

Read what is a Perpetual Motion Machine. That's POS. Security without burning energy can't be an assurance that POS is secure.

POS coins are actually what banks/exchanges like, because they can stake users' coins/have political leverage on the network without cost.

You can use your PC with i7 CPU, but cheap/low-power PC such as Raspberry Pi is good enough.


Money you earn depends on how many transaction is routed through your node and routing fee that you set. I doubt regular user could earn $10 - $30 / month only from routing fee.
But based on your question, i think you don't understand about LN. I suggest you research about LN and how it works in general.

POS has its own problems. It's a perpetual motion machine , https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perpetual_motion


An open source software/technology designed for banks? Banks will buy Bitcoin, and stake it to provide liquidity, and efficiency in Lightning?

here is the thing
the purpose of LN might well seem to be presented as offering fee's of 1 sat per channel hop
but multiple parties involved to multihop. multiply that

so although one node may only make 1 sat per swap.. reality is the distance from the sender to the receiver is like 10 hops away. so the fee for the sender is 10sat

..
one group of nodes are already setting themselves up as multiple points along a route
A<>B<>C<>D<>E<>F<>G<>H<>I<>J<>K
imagine it like this A wants to pay K
b will only get 1 sat for his part. C only 1 sat, D only 1 sat and so on
but it cost A 10 sat

now imagine if B D F H J all belonged to one person..
suddenly for that one payment from A-K that one person has earned 5 sats

..
next generation of game theory is that the 10 hop route costs A 10sat.. but the guy owning BDFHJ
then offers a route of
A-B-J-k for only 9 sat

so A prefers paying 9 instead of 10. and now the guy owning many chanels gets 9 sat instead of just 5
and making the independant nodes CEGI never get used and end up giving up using LN
..
but that was game theory back when the promotional media dribble was promising low sat fee's
with sat fees at 0.1% and most route being multiple hops. that total fee end to end is more than 0.1%
and if channel factories are clever enough they can get multiple 0.1% as shown above

have a nice day
and as for the bugs and flaws. i dont like to teach scammers how to scam. if your not smart enough to work it out you dont deserve it.
the LN devs themselves know of many flaws and yep they themselves have 'lost' funds from it
i say 'lost' because coins do not disapear off the blockchain. but silly bugs and bad rules make silly people give away their LN millsat funds to others. so that when a real bitcoin transaction occurs onchain its not in their favour. due to their silliness. they signed off on a broadcast transaction thats not in their favour due to the silliness of the LN contracts offchain(facepalm)

LN is not a safe network and not a network that should even be considered on the same neighbourhood as bitcoin. it does not deserve the fame/trust that the bitcoin network has

How much money does it cost you to create that node?
Can I use my PC (CORE i7) to do this, or do I need a specialized hardware device?

I read on one of the forums that I can make returns from $ 10 to $ 30 a month?
If this is true and I can manage 3 nodes without having to sit in front of the computer for a long time, then perhaps it is considered a good source of income in some countries where there is electricity and equipment.

Andreas Brekken tried hosting LN node on huge scale once with 49% of total LN capacity, but he only earned mere $0.34 in 2 weeks. If you're curious about it, here are his articles about it :
https://www.shitcoin.com/blog/bitcoin-lightning-network-1-can-i-compile-and-run-a-node
https://www.shitcoin.com/blog/bitcoin-lightning-network-2-we-must-first-become-the-lightning-network
https://www.shitcoin.com/blog/bitcoin-lightning-network-3-paying-for-goods-and-services
https://medium.com/andreas-tries-blockchain/bitcoin-lightning-network-4-what-happens-when-you-close-half-of-the-lightning-network-b25b330dfad2

Case shown by @BitCryptex is quite good, but IMO most users (without real services) will have experience more similar with Andreas Brekken case.

While LN fees will be cheaper than any PoW onchain coin it pretends to help,
there are some Proof of Stake alts that have fixed onchain fees lower than LN by huge margins.

LN was designed for banks, if you are not a bank, you won't profit from running an LN hub.

That promise is still true. Users are free to use other channels. Both LNbig.com and Alex's node charge outrageously higher fees than other Lightning Network nodes. Most people would argue that they provide a lot of large channels and paths for payment routing. While the latter is true, the former will become less and less relevant over time because of multipart payments.


You're right. The LN fees for larger payments would be nowhere near subsatoshi level if all nodes charged 0.1%-0.25% per transaction. Longer routes would be completely cost-inefficient. I believe that there will be plenty of smaller nodes offering lower fees. Currently, most LN nodes route payments at the default settings. Here are some of my calculations. Assumptions: BTC price - $10.000, routed payment value - $30.

LN fee = basefee + (amount * feerate / 1000000)

Default settings:



Currently known LNbig.com settings:



In my opinion, 1200 sat for a $30 transaction is way too much. If such payment was divided into 4 equal parts and sent through 4 different paths consisting of "default nodes" then 1 hop would cost:



That is definitely more cost-efficient and I believe that's what is going to happen in the future to most payments. Some parts of the payments, will be sent through cheaper routes.


What bugs exactly?

remember the dream. remember the promise of LN being the route to 'sub penny tx's
well onchain fees are ~$2 each due to dev stfling onchain progress
and a $30 LN is 0.1% - 0.25% = 3-9cents
so not even sub pennies.

remember in 2015 when people were saying their $30  was costing them 10cents onchain and things needed to be done to get it under a penny.
remember the promise of onchain discounts

seems the commercial businesses operating LN and have been pushing for LN for many years now. are already trying hard to get profits. all at the cost of user experience of a financial system that was suppose to break away from the corruption of the commercial fiat system

but hey.
many many people know of all the bugs of LN and are actually making more money by abusing the flaws than they do from operating an ethical business of economic benefit.

the unbanked countries of the world that earn 3-9 cents an hour are already laughing that LN is not fit for them.
long gone has the perception that bitcoin. is for the unbanked. because the commercial businesses stifled bitcoin to promote their LN network as the system for the unbanked. and already before LN is even out of beta testing LN is failing to fulfil that promise

In addition to what everyone else said, having had several nodes up over the last 18 months or so, unless you have the time to devote to it, run a node in a box.
You are not going to make any BTC, but from a learning point you can start with either mynodebtc or raspiblitz and go from there.
They work out of the box and you can tinker. Once you are confident you can start yours from scratch.

-Dave

The data from my post mentioned by Rizzrack is not really relevant; I should change that answer. Take this article from 2018 as an example for that year.

There are currently 25 nodes owned by LNbig.com. They provide about 52,19% (497,2647581 BTC out of 952,86 BTC) of the whole network's liquidity. I can't find any data on their recent earnings, but their Twitter account shares the amount of transactions and BTC passed through their nodes in the last 24 hours from time to time. You can clearly see the surge of the transactions in the last few months. Starting from 100-800 transactions in March and going to over 4000 in May. That is a huge change.

I have tried to calculate the possible earnings using the fee formula (basefee + (amount * feerate / 1000000) and the data from this tweet, but my results were far too off.

The 3rd March seems to have been the most profitable day. 161 routed transactions worth 2.24602985 BTC paid in total 219484 sat (0.00219484 BTC) in fees. At the current price of Bitcoin ($9300), it is about $20! Still, don't forget about the amount of coins locked up in all the nodes and the cost of opening transaction all channels.

The 24th January is even more impressive to me. 186 routed transactions worth 0.60161437 BTC paid in total 172378 sat (0.00172378 BTC) in fees. It is about $16 now.

Alex Bosworth shared that his node charged 0.25% per transaction and routed about $10,000/month which translates to earnings of about $25/month. He didn't say which node he was referring to, but since he is the CEO of yalls.org, we can assume that it was this one. That is actually interesting because of the significantly smaller capital.  

Coming back to earth, you are not going to earn much if your node doesn't provide enough liquidity. However, it is also worth mentioning that multipart payments are now available in all implementations. Once more wallets start supporting them, the earnings of well-connected, small nodes might increase.

Note: Keep in mind that 952,86 BTC is the amount of the funds locked up in public channels. Private channels are... private so we don't know how many of them exactly there are and what is their balance (although that might not be the case [5.4.2]). Such channels do not route any payments.

If you really want to help the Lightening network and the community in general, then yes go ahead with it.

However, if you are planing to make monetary gain from it, look for other investments. LN node wouldn't allow you to fetch much money because the fees in LN is very very low.

hope that makes sense!

I'll run it just to see how it work and the process behind it. as for my own payments, i don't do many of them, so few $ a month in transactions is ok for me at this point

Instead of running a node to earn from, you can use it for your own payments.
I haven't installed a LN node yet, light wallets work fine for me.